INTRODUCTIONESSAY / IMAGESTIMELINEBIBLIOGRAPHYPRESS RELEASE LINKS

ESSAY CONTINUED

About the 2005 Jurors

Karen Irvine is the Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago and a part time instructor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. She has organized numerous exhibitions including: Audible Imagery: Sound and Photography; Anthony Goicolea; Tracey Baran; Scott Fortino; Shirana Shahbazi: Goftare Nik/Good Words; Jason Salavon; Jin Lee; Paul Shambroom: Evidence of Democracy; Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi; The Furtive Gaze, a group exhibition of works by artists who use the camera as an instrument of surveillance; and Camera/Action which explored the relationship between performance art and photography. Irvine is the author of Laura Letinsky (Galerie Kusseneers, Antwerp, 2005); Anthony Goicolea (Contemporary Magazine, 2004); Assembled Works: Photographs by Dave Jordano (2003); and Ann Lislegaard: ‘Eyes Wide Open’ (The Royal Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, 2002). An active lecturer and guest juror, she received her MFA in photography from FAMU, Prague, and is currently pursuing a MA degree in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Brian Wallis is Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the International Center of Photography (New York), where he organized the recent Larry Clark retrospective, among other exhibitions, and co-organized Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005), Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2004), and Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2003). His publications include Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (1999); Constructing Masculinity (1995); Blasted Allegories: Writings by Contemporary Artists (1986); and Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984).

Post Kodachrome? The Future of Color Photography

Further reflecting the exciting evolution of photography since Godowsky’s and Mannes’s invention, the definitions of “color” as well as “photograph” have radically changed and the works in this exhibition reflect this shift. In the wake of the digital revolution, we can only guess what technological developments in color are yet to come. Kodak recently announced that it is reducing production runs of the Kodachrome films due to the limited number of labs that can process it. Kodak discontinued Kodachrome 25 film in 2002; Kodachrome 64 and 200 films are still available. Currently, there are only three Kodachrome film processing labs listed on Kodak’s website: Lausanne, Switzerland; Tokyo, Japan; and Parsons, KS. The last slide projectors rolled off the Kodak lines in October 2004 and were given a suitable send-off at a ceremony held November 18, 2004 at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY (the last one was signed by the employees, and given to the Smithsonian Institution). As recently as May 9, 2005, Kodak announced that Kodachrome 40 Super 8 film will no longer be produced, but production of its 16 mm movie film will continue. During the writing of this publication, an online petition to save the Super 8 film went from 600 to over 3700 signatures.

Nevertheless, Kodachrome film remains one of the films in longest continuous production in the entire history of photography—color or black and white—and continues to inspire intense devotion among imagemakers. As image permanence expert Henry Wilhelm noted in 2002, stored under archival conditions, “The overall image stability of current Process K-14 Kodachrome film is better than any color film ever made.” Generations of photographers and filmmakers have boxes of unexposed film stored away in their freezers and older film can still be bought on eBay. Museum exhibitions, such as the recent Slideshow: Projected Images in Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, consider the cultural meaning of the slide and chart the importance of such technology to contemporary artists. Color is now more popular than ever and, paradoxically enough, museum departments in photography, painting, and contemporary art are debating which area ought to acquire the larger-format color images. Perhaps, much like the current rise in interest in historical photographic processes, Kodachrome film will enjoy a well-deserved revival. In the years after World War II, Kodachrome film was actually considered its own separate medium—so much so that a park (Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah) and a song were eventually named after it. As the New York Times recently reported in their May 31, 2005 story on Kodachrome Super 8 film being discontinued, many today still agree with Paul Simon’s sentiment in his 1973 musical hit Kodachrome: “Mama, Don’t take my Kodachrome away.”